The Plowboy Interview: Frances Moore Lappe

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Cargill exports over a quarter of all the grain that leaves this country . . . dominates storage space at major ports . . . is the second largest producer of animal feeds and the number one cattle feeder in the country . . . runs huge sunflower and soybean processing operations . . . and—on top of all that—recently bought out the giant meatpacking firm, Missouri Beef Packers. And because the company has significant foreign operations as well, it actually competes with American farmers in order to keep farm prices down!

PLOWBOY: Doesn't the same production system contribute to tight control of the food-processing industry as well?

LAPPE: Yes, and that area also shows a tremendous economic concentration. Since World War II, our nation has lost half of all its food manufacturing businesses. And only 0.2%0 of those remaining control two-thirds of the entire food industry. Consequently, in the cereal, baby food, soup, and beer product areas, four corporations control over half of the sales. They have what's called a shared monopoly . . . and don't compete with each other on the basis of price. It's been estimated that this collusion results in a direct overcharge to consumers of close to $20 billion a year!

PLOWBOY: If they don't attempt to beat each other out of shares of the market by pricing, how do these giant corporations compete?

LAPPE: In my new edition of Diet, I ask the reader to pretend that he or she is president of an imaginary company called Conglomerated Foods, Inc. and to try to come up with strategies to increase sales and profits. Well, the chapter presents five or six possible plans—such as making more products to grab a bigger share of the market, creating consumer loyalty with a heavy advertising blitz, processing foods into "prepared" dinners in order to charge higher prices for the same ingredients, cutting costs by replacing substantial food ingredients with less expensive ones (such as salt, sugar, and artificial flavors), and so forth—and then demonstrates that each moneymaking strategy leads to the creation of more additiveladen, less healthful food.

The point is that one doesn't have to be an evil cutthroat to follow these steps . . . he or she just has to follow the logic of corporate expansion. Indeed, Dr. Kellogg—founder of the giant corporation that bears his name—was a strict vegetarian. And the first creation of the man who launched General Foods was Postum, a coffee substitute devised to free us from the evils of caffeine. Simple, profit-maximizing logic led these and other once well-intentioned companies to take steps that were detrimental to consumers' health.

PLOWBOY: But does anyone really know what effect heavily processed foods might have on those who use them?

LAPPE: Let me put it this way: To eat the typical American diet is to participate in the biggest experiment in human nutrition ever conducted . . . one in which the "guinea pigs" don't seem to be doing so well. Americans are eating more fat, more sugar, and more salt than they used to-while taking in too many calories and too little fiber-and each of these changes has been linked to heightened risk of disease. v Now I'm not trying to scold people for eating a poor diet, because most of us are victims of the food system. The problem isn't that individuals are adding too much sugar, salt, and fat to their foods. Many Americans eat two or three times the recommended daily intake of salt without once wielding a saltshaker! And the average U.S. household uses less sugar today than it did 40 years ago. But these abused food ingredients are being added for us by the processing industry. Almost half the calories in a Big Mac or a Ritz cracker are fat . . . a Coca-Cola has the sugar equivalent of a piece of chocolate cake . . . and a cup of canned corn contains one-fifth of a person's recommended daily salt intake.

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